Tech Talks Daily
00:10:19 · Harvey Liu
[00:10:19] S1: Oh, definitely. I learned lots of... I think it's learned lots of things from the hard way, I think. From the from the experience, like, from the paper, I think back in the days, people think of centralized exchange will be, like, all of them is making good money. Right? So people from that point of view, they want to get into the business. But I think at the first day when we started, we didn't really think it's gonna be a a very smooth journey. We we had the preparation for the difficulties. But I think the the lessons I learned at the beginning, we we have put a lot of investment into tech... In the tech side to just make sure we have the best technology. We have the best security. Also, we we built... We are able to do to provide the transparency as well using proof of reserves, that kind of thing. But I think the lessons I learned, I've... We should have invested more, basically. And we invested more in the sense that we can get our products developed faster. I think time is very important for for a business like Central Access because the com... The competition is very, very, very strong. Right? So, basically, we had... One story I had is that we have this idea of, I would say, Binance Square. Like, everybody use Binance. Right? So so we had this idea back in 2022. At the beginning, we have this idea to build a Binance Square. As a product, actually, is not is not exist at the time. So... But Binance has more investment and the more development team, so so they build it faster. So we are still trying to to put our own type of square... Public square product out, but I think it will release this quarter. So we will be slow because the... Our team is is way smaller in finance. But the the story is learned as if... I think at the beginning, we should invest more on the tech side, the more product team we can develop the the product way faster ahead of the competitors. So that will give us more edge over the other exchanges. But I think it's not it's still not too late because I think we did very good investment on our infrastructures. One approve... One approve is that last year when when ten, eleven, the the crypto prices crashed, there's lots of centralized exchange experience outage. And we didn't because we had we had... Our technical team has built a lot of redundancies and extra sir... Server server capacity.
00:12:53 · Harvey Liu, Neil C. Hughes
So we made sure we didn't really experience any any outage during that time. So that's something we really think we we done it right, and we should have done it more. Yeah. [00:13:05] S0: I think you're in somewhat of a unique position here because you've worked as an investor. Now you're working as a founder. How has that changed the way that you judge whether a trading platform has a a durable business model rather than a a good growth story and and anything else that you might see differently?
00:13:22 · Harvey Liu
[00:13:22] S1: I think it it definitely changed a lot. I think from the investor point of view, you basically... When I was was working for the venture capital firms, so we basically acting as a minority investor. Basically, we go in there. We find a promising projects in maybe a minority stake, 2020% the most, maybe 10%. And we would maybe invest a similar project maybe in the same industry. We just plot our cities, right? So we wait for it to grow. And maybe quarterly, we give some guidance to them and make sure they are not they are actually they're doing the right proper business management, that kind of thing. But I think it's more relaxed as a venture capitalist than than actually go... You're going to business, run it yourself, basically. So it would rather be when we're building our own projects, I would be very concerned about... First of all, we when the product rolled out, we have to make budget, and we have to bring users. So, basically, user growth is very important. At the same time, we also need to control our budget and control our cost. So on the viable business, in the actual business world, is that you def... Definitely, at certain point, you need to have a positive cash flow. So you you don't have endless cash. So, basically, you plan your business based on your cash flow, and you're managing that. I think that's the most important part. And at the end of... Also, the last most important part is that as a founder and the CEO of the of the business, you... Eventually, you need to be responsible for what... Whatever happens to the company. And if there's end users losing any kind of assets on the platform, you have to be responsible for it. I think that's... It's totally different than you're running as a a like, a investor from a venture capital firm. So that's the major difference. Yeah.
00:15:20 · Neil C. Hughes, Harvey Liu
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00:16:32 · Neil C. Hughes, Harvey Liu
[00:16:32] S0: Yeah. [00:16:33] S1: And we do... When when there's strong local authority or strong local regulations, we actually... We just act proactively, like, forbid those... Forbid access to all those those areas. For example, US, UK, Singapore, Mainland, China, which just blocked access. So we we are bringing a a global brand. But if locals are already, like, the strong authority will oppose to us and tell us that maybe certain things that we don't need to do, we we always happy to to cooperate. At at the same time, we we also looking at to get the proper license for the bigger market. For example, Europe. In Europe, we can... We're trying to get MiCA. In in the Gulf regions, we're trying to get VARA from UAE, and that's also in the progress. I think in the future, we will be... We will also looking at maybe just going to the local... Localized market when those proper licenses is in place. Yeah. [00:17:28] S0: And for any founder listening, especially in this space, behind the technology, when people are trusting a platform with their money, what responsibility should founders accept when engineering or risk decision could have on maybe direct financial consequences for their users? Any advice here? This must be... Is... I would imagine it's one of those things that might keep you up at at night, but anything you could share around that under the heavy burden of responsibility there too.
00:17:56 · Harvey Liu
[00:17:56] S1: Yeah. I think there's lots of things you need to consider. For example, I think, especially in the crypto world, for securities is most important. So recently, there's exchanges being being exposed to hackers, so they lose money. I think eventually, this this type of thing as a founder and CEO, you you you have to take responsible for it. But I think that the top priority for us is to make sure we run a periodic security audit with hacking with these top security forms, make sure we don't have any vulnerabilities on our platform. That's on the on the infrastructure side. Also, on the... I think on the operational side, we also have rules. We have just identified maybe fraudulent and every... Like, system loopholes. We have kill switch. When we see something really going bad, we can we can just do a temporary suspension on certain operations. So make sure there's no no money actually losing from platform to the hackers on the platform. So that's very important. I think on operational side also, I think it's not not just only the the securities will cause users loss. Maybe certain type of, like, a fraudulent projects. Like, maybe just... There's so many shitcoins, meme coins, all these kind of, like, projects sort of similar. Eventually, it's gonna cause investors to lose lots of money. So we are actually very, very strict on on the listings on our platform. So we only listing some of the top of major major projects in the system. And, also, we look at maybe better quality projects like stocks and The US stocks and commodities. Those does have investment grade values like those kind of projects we listed. So make sure the users who buy or trade our platform, they they get the real values, and, eventually, they can make some money. So that's what we believe. Yeah.